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SUMMARY:Economic Thought and the Victorian Individual: Examining Narrative
 s of Daily Life - Hannah Scally
DTSTART:20120424T121000Z
DTEND:20120424T130000Z
UID:TALK37712@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Xinyi Liu
DESCRIPTION:How did Victorians make sense of daily economic life?  We know
  a great deal about the development of more formally articulated narrative
 s of economic activity - Ricardo\, J.S. Mill\, Ruskin\, Chalmers - narrati
 ves that contributed to the emerging discipline of economics\, and helped 
 Victorians structure the evolving systems of high capitalism.  But we stil
 l know relatively little of the conceptual landscape of small-scale econom
 ic practice - the logic of individual spending\, selling and saving\, of b
 orrowing and lending\, which took place at a remove from these formal\, or
 thodox narratives.  These daily practices - what we might call lived econo
 mic experience - followed their own narrative logic: one that was construc
 ted out of the experience of millions of Victorian adults and children.  I
 ndividual economic behaviour was understood in terms of a much wider const
 ellation of social and moral narratives\, and Victorian culture is saturat
 ed with economic personae that blend the economic with the moral along the
 se lines: the Scrooge\, the debtor\, the businessman\, the philanthropist.
   This paper looks at the intellectual and cultural framework of lived eco
 nomic experience in the mid-Victorian period.  It follows a strand of rece
 nt scholarship which aims to complicate our understanding of Victorian eco
 nomic thought and practice\, looking to alternative sites of activity and 
 research methodologies in literature and culture.  Rather than a conceptua
 lly segregated sphere of economic activity\, this points to an economic li
 fe that is fully embedded in sociocultural life\, with high degree of diff
 erentiation in economic practice along gender\, class\, geographic and rel
 igious lines.  Focusing on this idea of differentiation at the level of li
 ved economic experience\, this paper takes up the idea of economic persona
 \, or character\, as an alternative structuring narrative that functioned 
 as a model for performing and assessing individual economic behaviour.\n
LOCATION:Entertaining Room\, Darwin College
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